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The study focuses on the ambiguity of management decisions in conditions of economic competition and quarantine restrictions. It is concluded that in the field of freight transportation there are antagonistic interests of the environment in the process of making management decisions by managers of JSC “Ukrzaliznytsia”. The classification of information situations related to the uncertainty of the environment is used, according to which the fifth information situation most closely corresponds to the current situation in the market of transport services. The choice of the fifth information situation is due to the factors caused by the government’s decisions to impose quarantine restrictions. Most of these factors have had a negative impact on the expectations of businesses in general and cargo owners in particular. The state of economic competition in the field of freight transportation was studied by analyzing the structure of goods by different modes of transport for January-November 2019-2020, indicating the absence of significant changes or restrictions on freight traffic. Thus, quarantine restrictions did not cause irreparable damage to the railway industry directly, but they indirectly affected a number of indicators. Analysis of economic competition, level of uncertainty, degree of ambivalence of government decisions and structural and dynamic analysis of the market of transport services in January-November 2019-2020, allowed creating a methodology that ensures the validity of management decisions in economic competition and ambivalence of government actions. It consists of 6 stages: formulation of the purpose; formation of the corresponding information base; formation of an expert group; direct survey; selection of the most promising solutions for stabilizing the situation in the field of rail freight; assessment of the homogeneity of the expert group. The application of this technique gives railway companies additional competitive advantages, even in conditions of growing uncertainty and risk.

The article examines the judicial protection of economic competition and the restriction of monopoly in Ukraine. On the way to Ukraine’s transition to new economic institutions, there is a need to create new relationships between different business entities. International standards require the introduction and continuous improvement of the mechanism of judicial protection of economic competition and the restriction of monopoly in Ukraine, which is the basis of the protection mechanism and ensure the restoration of violated rights of both entrepreneurs and consumers. Today in Ukraine, the lack of real planning in the economic sphere leads to the absence of such production, unemployment and other negative processes in the economic sphere. It is determined that business entities have the right to appeal to the court against the decision of any public authority or local government body to apply administrative and economic sanctions to it. If a state authority or local self-government body adopts an act that does not comply with the law and violates the rights or legitimate interests of the business entity, the latter has the right to apply to the court to declare such an act invalid. It was found out that the court enforces the decisions of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, such as the application of fines and penalties accrued on the unpaid amount of the fine. In addition, the law stipulates that the state commissioner of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, the head of the territorial branch of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine or their authorized employees of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, its territorial branches have the right to get acquainted with these cases and receive copies. The Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine and its territorial branches have the right to intervene as third parties who do not make independent claims on the subject of the dispute, if the decision may affect their rights and responsibilities in exercising state control over the protection of economic competition. Judicial protection of economic competition and restriction of monopoly in Ukraine is a highly specialized area based on a set of administrative, economic, commercial, civil and commercial law to restore the violated right, protection and defense of violated rights of both entrepreneurs and consumers.

This study aims to make a critical review of provincial competitiveness index (PCI) in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. In this regard, the research examines relationships between PCI and the possible attraction of enterprises operating in the region, thereafter, proposes some policy recommendations to improve business environment in the region. The secondary dataset of PCI and enterprise were incorporate with primary data collected from qualitative methods to explore the effect of PCI on enterprise attraction. The results show that the enterprises which have been operating in the Central Highlands accounted for 2.2% of the total with invested capital and accounted for 1.1% of whole country in 2018. PCI highly correlates with the number of enterprises, the employees and the capital of enterprises. Consequently, in order to attract enterprises, local governments in the region need to improve sub-indexes thereby improving general PCI scores.

This paper constructs the measurement index of core competence by text analysis method and empirically tests the impact of core competence on stock price synchronicity. We find that the stronger the core competence, the lower the stock price synchronicity, and mechanism test shows that core competence reduces the stock price synchronicity by enhancing the transparency of corporate information, which is still valid under a series of robustness tests. Further research shows that:(1) when the corporate governance environment is poor (higher level of internal earnings management, lower quality of accounting information, greater separation of ownership and control, lower shareholding ratio of external institutional investors, weaker product market competition, less media attention), the core competence has a more significant effect on the decline of stock price synchronization; (2)vertically, the dynamic improvement of core competence in the time dimension can play a role in stabilizing stock price synchronization; (3)after distinguishing the types of core competence, we find that the core competence related to information disclosure is more helpful to reduce the stock price synchronization; (4)after the CSRC forces listed companies to disclose the core competence information in the annual report, the core competence plays a stronger role in reducing the stock price synchronization. This study reveals the important role of core competence in reducing stock price synchronization. It not only enriches the relevant literature of core competence and stock price synchronization, but also has important practical significance for the government and regulatory departments to improve the efficiency of capital market allocation.

Financial support of POCTI/EGE/58934/2004 (Pedro P. Barros) and the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA and projects 2005SGR-00836, SEJ2006-00538-ECON, and Consolider-Ingenio 2010 (Xavier Martinez-Giralt) is gratefully acknowledged. Altres ajuts: POCI/EGE/58934/2004 i HP2003-0066 Ramsey pricing has been proposed in the pharmaceutical industry as a principle to price discriminate among markets while allowing to recover the (fixed) R&D cost. However, such analyses neglect the presence of insurance or the fund raising costs for most of drug reimbursement. By incorporating these new elements, we aim at providing some building blocks towards an economic theory incorporating Ramsey pricing and insurance coverage. We show how coinsurance affects the optimal prices to pay for the R&D investment. We also show that under certain conditions, there is no strategic incentive by governments to set coinsurance rates in order to shift the financial burden of R&D. This will have important implications to the application of Ramsey pricing principles to pharmaceutical products across countries.

At the end of the 20th century a new banking model, the so-called ethical banking, emerged becoming the maximum exponent of a socially responsible investment. The financial crisis in 2008 led to a distrust of the conventional financial system and consequently investors began to look with interest this new banking, which only invests in ethical activities and products, with social and environmental criteria, total transparency and a democratic management. The aim of this article is to analyze the economic structure of ethical banking, compared to that of conventional banking, by paying attention to its liquidity, coverage and solvency. Specifically, We compare the financial statements of Triodos Bank, the main European ethical bank belonging to the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, with two of the main conventional banks of each of the five countries in Europe in which it operates. To do this, we apply a financial and economic analysis to the period from 2015 to 2018, the means difference test and analysis of variance on an array of financial ratios and, finally, probit regressions. The results reveal that ethical banking is growing more than conventional banking and it presents greater liquidity and solvency, although, in general terms, its profitability is not higher. In conclusion, both savers and investors have guarantees that their savings are invested not only in a responsible but also in a confident way in ethical banking.

Traditionally, firm competition has been studied in contexts where the dimensionality of the product attribute space is given, and firms deploy their strategies constrained by this space. However, firms may exert influence on the local structure of the product attribute space by offering product variants with new attributes. As a result, the geometry of the product attribute space would change endogenously through firms' actions, and this emergent new geometry modifies the conditions for subsequent firm behavior. By focusing on this interplay between actors and conditions, we explore the co-evolution of the firm and the product attribute space. Through a multi-variant Cournot competition framework, we develop a computational model in which firms invest to differentiate their products from other variants, but as minimally as possible so that demand from closely similar existing variants can be stolen. We introduce the fraction dimensionality of the attribute space as our critical independent variable, to reflect saturation of the space with product varieties. The simulation reveals that while new product variants are typically introduced by firms with scale economies, their performance gap with firms without scale economies reduces as fraction dimensionality increases. This indicates that space geometry evolution may favor small-scale players, even when their large-scale competitors are the driving force behind attribute space changes.

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. We examine whether family doctor firms in England respond to local competition by increasing their quality. We measure quality in terms of clinical performance and patient-reported satisfaction to capture its multi-dimensional nature. We use a panel covering 8 years for over 8000 English general practices. We measure competition as the number of rival doctors within a small distance and control for a large number of potential confounders. We find that increases in local competition are associated with increases in patient satisfaction and to a lesser extent in clinical quality. However, the magnitude of the effect is small.

Background Drug price setting is one of the key challenges faced by the Japanese health care system. This study aims to identify the determinants of drug price in Japan using the example of the rheumatoid arthritis (RA) treatment market. Research design and methods In order to compare prices across different products, we calculated prices per defined daily dose using WHO methodology. Price determinants were calculated both at launch and over time using IMS quarterly data on medicines approved for RA treatment in Japan from 2012 to 2015. Pharmaceutical pricing was modeled as a function of clinical and economic variables using regression analysis. Results For prices at the launch we found that differences in efficacy are not reflected in price differentials. We also report that the number of products within a molecule class had a negative effect on prices while originator drugs maintained higher prices. Conclusion Although the existing pricing rules in Japan are very comprehensive they do not necessarily capture differences in product characteristics. The findings here support the notion that competitive forces are weak in highly regulated markets such as Japan.

Nowadays, the idea of firms’ atomization is rejected and companies are perceived as entities embedded in inter-organizational relationships and their configurations, including dyads and networks. The relational view in strategic management thus prompts research on a firm’s relational strategy. This paper taps this gap considering links between strategic choices and attributes of a company’s inter-organizational relationships, as well as the outcomes achieved by collaboration with different groups of stakeholders. We test the model based on research carried out on a representative sample of 400 enterprises operating in Poland and on international markets. The results of structural equation modeling show that 1) the outcomes of collaboration reflect market benefits and are dependent on the durability of the inter-organizational relationships and the heterogeneity of the supply chain relationships, 2) durability as an attribute of the relational strategy depends on the choice of how to create and appropriate value, and 3) in turn, the attribute of heterogeneity of the relational strategy depends on what type of partners are selected. Thereby, we deliver managerial implications on how to create a relational strategy to achieve a relational rent and better a company’s market position.

This article investigates the impact of Certificate of Need (CON) laws on competition in the inpatient care market. One of the major criticisms of these laws is that it may hinder competition in the health care market, which can lead to higher prices. However, from a theoretical standpoint, CON laws could also promote competition by limiting excessive expansion from incumbents. Our main conclusion is that CON laws by and large enhanced competition in the inpatient market during the period of our study. This indicates that the effects of CON laws to hinder predatory behavior could dominate its effects of preventing new entrants into the inpatient care market. We do not find statistically significant evidence to reject the exogeneity assumption of either CON laws or their stringency in our study. We also find factors such as proportion of population aged 18–44, proportion of Asian American population, obesity rate, political environment, etc., in a state significantly impact competition. Our findings could shed some light to public policy makers when deciding the appropriate health programs or legislative framework to promote health care market competition and thereby facilitate quality health care.

Vaccine purchase cost has grown substantially over the last few decades. A closer look at vaccine prices reveals that not all vaccines shared the same increasing pattern. Various factors, such as vaccine attributes, competition, and supply shortages, could relate to price changes. In this study, we examined whether a variety of factors influenced the prices of noninfluenza childhood vaccines purchased in the public sector from 1996 to 2014. The association differed among price-capped vaccines and combination vaccines. There was an increasing time trend in real prices for non-price-capped vaccines, which was mostly offset by the effect of market longevity. The effect of competition in lowering prices was more pronounced among non-price-capped vaccines when manufacturer and vaccine component fixed effects were excluded. Supply shortage, manufacturer name change, and number of vaccine doses in series showed no effect. The results may help policy makers better understand price behaviors and make more informed decisions in vaccine planning and financing.

Objective To examine the effects of hospital and insurer markets concentration on transaction prices for inpatient hospital services. Data Sources Measures of hospital and insurer markets concentration derived from American Hospital Association and HealthLeaders-InterStudy data are linked to 2005–2008 inpatient administrative data from Truven Health MarketScan Databases. Study Design Uses a reduced-form price equation, controlling for cost and demand shifters and accounting for possible endogeneity of market concentration using instrumental variables (IV) technique. Principal Findings The findings suggest that greater hospital concentration raises prices, whereas greater insurer concentration depresses prices. A hypothetical merger between two of five equally sized hospitals is estimated to increase hospital prices by about 9 percent (p

Due to changing macro and micro factors, expiring patents and falling net income, pharmaceutical companies need to rethink their vertical business model. The trend shows cross-sectorial partnerships and consolidation to remain and compete on the market. Areas covered: Quantitative research interviewing a target group of 25 key executives from small, mid and large global pharmaceutical companies rounded with qualitative literature research completing the analysis. Expert commentary: Uncertainty in the industry due to changing external factors i.e. pricing pressures, regulations or an economic slowdown, slowing down innovations and new drug outcomes. Pharmaceutical companies understand the existing hurdles, and are critically optimistic implementing new business models. Also, various stakeholders are included in the value chain due to their growing importance.During the next years, the industry will be restructured from volume towards value, and only pharmaceutical companies' clairaudient and reciprocate to the changes with an out-off the box thinking will be able to resist on the market. Small biotech companies should focus on research, and big pharmaceutical companies entering at development focusing on the process until the distribution. This execution business recommendation would enable the best know-how at the right point, mitigating the risk and enhancing the patient outcomes.

This article reviews current trends in patent claims regarding personalised, stratified and precision medicine. These trends are not particularly well understood by policymakers, even less by the public, and are quite recent. Consequently, their implications for the public interest have hardly been thought out. Some see personalised and other secondary drug patent claims as promoting better targeted treatment. Others are inclined to see them as \manifestations of ‘evergreening’ whereby companies are, in some cases quite cynically, trying to extend market monopolies in old products or creating new monopolies based on supposedly improved versions of such earlier drugs. The article claims that the relaxation of ‘novelty’ is a privilege unavailable to inventions in other fields and that on balance the patent systemdoesprivilege this industry and that no adequate case has yet been made thus far to prove the public benefits overall.

Pro-competitive policy reforms have been introduced in several countries, attempting to contain increasing healthcare costs. Yet, research proves ambiguous when it comes to the effect of competition in healthcare, with a number of studies highlighting unintended and unwanted effects. We argue that current empirical work overlooks the role of inter-organizational relations as well as the interplay between policy at macro level, inter organizational networks at meso level, and outcomes at micro level. To bridge this gap and stimulate a more detailed understanding of the effect of competition in health care, this article introduces a cross-level conceptual framework which emphasizes the intermediary role of cooperative inter-organizational relations at meso level. We discuss how patient transfers, specialist affiliations, and interlocking directorates constitute three forms of inter-organizational relations in health care which can be used within this framework. The paper concludes by deriving several propositions from the framework which can guide future research. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act established health insurance marketplaces to allow consumers to make educated decisions about their health care coverage. During the first open enrollment period in 2013, the federally facilitated marketplace in Pima County, Arizona listed 119 plans, making it one of the most competitive markets in the country. This study compares these plans based on differences in consumer cost sharing, including deductibles, co-pays and premiums. Consumer costs were reviewed using specific cases including a normal delivery pregnancy, the management of Type II Diabetes, and the utilization of specialty drugs to treat Hepatitis C. Total cost of care was calculated as the cost of managing the condition or event plus the cost of monthly premiums, evaluated as a single individual age 27. Evaluating a plan on premium alone is not sufficient as cost sharing can dramatically raise the cost of care. A rating system and better cost transparency tools could provider easier access to pertinent information for consumers.

The relationship between open innovation and company’s competitive advantage, and organisational capabilities required remains to be explained. This study was conducted to answer the following questions. Does open innovation create organisation's competitive advantage? What types of capabilities are needed in the process of open innovation reaching competitive advantage, and what kind of relationship do they have? This study extends the scope of theoretical discussion about open innovation from the point of dynamic capability view. The results confirmed the statistical significance of the path linking open innovation to competitive advantage through product innovation. From the viewpoint of capabilities, transforming capability plays a role of significant prerequisite of sensing capability and seizing capability, having a direct or indirect significant effect on product innovation performance and competitive advantage sequentially. The results suggest that the linkages between the needed capabilities of organisation must be considered for performing open innovation to secure competitive advantage.

The private healthcare sector in low- and middle-income countries is increasingly seen as of public health importance, with widespread interest in improving private provider engagement. However, there is relatively little literature providing an in-depth understanding of the operation of private providers. We conducted a mixed methods analysis of the nature of competition faced by private delivery providers in Uttar Pradesh, India, where maternal mortality remains very high. We mapped health facilities in five contrasting districts, surveyed private facilities providing deliveries and conducted in-depth interviews with facility staff, allied providers (e.g. ambulance drivers, pathology laboratories) and other key informants. Over 3800 private facilities were mapped, of which 8% reported providing deliveries, mostly clustered in cities and larger towns. 89% of delivery facilities provided C-sections, but over half were not registered. Facilities were generally small, and the majority were independently owned, mostly by medical doctors and, to a lesser extent, AYUSH (non-biomedical) providers and others without formal qualifications. Recent growth in facility numbers had led to intense competition, particularly among mid-level facilities where customers were more price sensitive. In all facilities, nearly all payment was out-of-pocket, with very low-insurance coverage. Non-price competition was a key feature of the market and included location (preferably on highways or close to government facilities), medical infrastructure, hotel features, staff qualifications and reputation, and marketing. There was heavy reliance on visiting consultants such as obstetricians, surgeons and anaesthetists, and payment of hefty commission payments to agents who brought clients to the facility, for both new patients and those transferring from public facilities. Building on these insights, strategies for private sector engagement could include a foundation of universal facility registration, adaptation of accreditation schemes to lower-level facilities, improved third-party payment mechanisms and strategic purchasing, and enhanced patient information on facility availability, costs and quality.

We provide a model where hospitals compete on quality under a fixed price regime to investigate (i) whether hospital competition, as measured by an increase in fixed prices or increased patient choice, increases or reduces the gap in quality between high- and low-quality hospitals, and as a result, (ii) whether competition increases or reduces (pure) health inequalities across hospitals and patient severities. The answer to the first question is generally ambiguous, but we find that the scope for competition to result in quality convergence across hospitals is larger when the marginal patient health gains from quality decrease at a faster rate. Whether competition increases health inequalities depends on the type and measure of inequality. If the patient health benet function is not too concave in quality, health inequalities due to postcode lottery will increase (decrease) whenever competition induces quality dispersion (convergence). Competition reduces health inequalities between high- and low-severity patients if patient composition effects, due to high-severity patients being more likely to exercise choice, are small. We also investigate the effect of competition on health inequalities as measured by the Gini and the Generalised Gini coe¢ cients, and highlight differences compared to the simpler dispersion measures., Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Finance research shows capital structure has an important effect on the product-market competitiveness of firms. Our paper documents an asymmetric effect of capital structure on firms' competitiveness in a sample of Chinese firms. Firms whose capital structure is characterized by a low leverage but rapid leverage growth has a dominant position in their product market. The industry average leverage ratio is also a critical factor influencing firms' competitiveness. High debt levels hinder firms' competitiveness. The influence of capital structure on firms' product-market competitiveness varies based on the extent of industry concentration. In highly concentrated industries, high leverage level and slow leverage growth suppress firms' competitiveness to a larger extent compared with industries with low concentration.

With the development of e-commerce, delivery time is regarded as a key competitive advantage in an oligopoly market, as shortening the delivery time can stimulate demand for products. Many firms adopt a variety of strategies to shorten delivery time, and holding sufficient inventory is reported as an effective way. This study integrates a market share attraction model based on delivery time competition with the traditional inventory model to determine the optimal delivery time and order quantity. With the use of supermodular game method, we investigate the effect of changes in marketing and operations factors on the equilibrium delivery time and order quantity in non-dominated and dominated oligopolistic markets. The results reveal that the equilibrium delivery time and order quantity exhibit a directional response to changes in marketing and operations factors, and the response differs between the non-dominated oligopoly and the dominated oligopoly. Furthermore, under a cooperative oligopolistic market with asymmetry, it is beneficial for the firms with high competitive strength to adopt the delivery time strategy, but it fails to do so for the firm with the low competitive strength. Lastly, numerical analysis suggests that marketing factors play a more important role in affecting equilibrium measures than operations factors.

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that idiosyncratic features of the healthcare sector leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across a variety of conditions and performance measures that higher quality hospitals tend to have higher market shares at a point in time and expand more over time. Moreover, we find that the relationship between performance and allocation is stronger among patients who have greater scope for hospital choice, suggesting a role for patient demand in allocation in the hospital sector. Our findings suggest that the healthcare sector may have more in common with “traditional” sectors subject to standard market forces than is often assumed.

This paper evaluates the impact of market competition on health care volume and cost. At the start of 2005, the financing system of Dutch hospitals started to be gradually changed from a closed-end budgeting system to a non-regulated price competitive prospective reimbursement system. The gradual implementation of price competition is a ‘natural experiment’ that provides a unique opportunity to analyze the effects of market competition on hospital behavior. We have access to a unique database, which contains hospital discharge data of diagnosis treatment combinations (DBCs) of individual patients, including detailed care activities. Difference-in-difference estimates show that the implementation of market-based competition leads to relatively lower total costs, production volume and number of activities overall. Difference-in-difference estimates on treatment level show that the average costs for outpatient DBCs decreased due to a decrease in the number of activities per DBC. The introduction of market competition led to an increase of average costs of inpatient DBCs. Since both volume and number of activities have not changed significantly, we conclude that the cost increase is likely the result of more expensive activities. A possible explanation for our finding is that hospitals look for possible efficiency improvements in predominantly outpatient care products that are relatively straightforward, using easily analyzable technologies. The effects of competition on average cost and the relative shares of inpatient and outpatient treatments on specialty level are significant but contrary for cardiology and orthopedics, suggesting that specialties react differently to competitive incentives.